TIM BOOTH (JAMES)

IT WOULD BE FAIR TO ASSUME THAT FOR THE NEW JAMES ALBUM FRONTMAN TIM BOOTH MIGHT HAVE CHOSEN TO WITHDRAW HIMSELF SLIGHTLY – 2014’S LA PETITE MORT HAD BEEN A RAW, VIVID AND SOMETIMES PAINFULLY EXPOSED TREATISE ON SEX, DEATH AND SPIRITUALITY.

Yet, on GIRL AT THE END OF THE WORLD (out this week) he continues unprotected ‘soul mining’, offering up another twelve nuggets from the coalface of the human condition. As ever, it’s deeply affecting – though this time it takes a few more listens for the songs to sink in and begin working that familiar James magic. It’s a much more experimental album, musically (though those with conservative tastes have no real cause to panic – you won’t be filing it alongside the cult classic, improvisational and Brian Eno-produced WAH WAH). In an often exhilarating move, on GIRL AT THE END OF THE WORLD James stride into what is, for them, sometimes unchartered territory. Keyboards are much higher in the mix and more central to the songwriting process. Though there are hits apparent here, this time round James have reconvened to produce one of their most dangerously ambitious records to date… In this new interview with The Mouth Magazine, conducted by telephone, Tim Booth speaks about GIRL AT THE END OF THE WORLD – and yet, as ever, we occasionally find ourselves wading into deeper waters throughout our conversation…

HELLO AGAIN TIM, HOW ARE YOU..?Hi, hello again! Yeah, I’m good – but tired… We’ve been running around doing different weird things in London for a few days. We did the Chris Evans show on Radio Two this morning – but you have to get up at about five o’clock to do that… It’s not really what we signed up for when we joined a rock ‘n’ roll band.

I WONDERED IF YOU MIGHT HAVE GONE OUT ON THE TOWN WITH MR EVANS AFTER THE SHOW…
Aha… Ha ha. I don’t think he does that anymore. I think he goes straight to TOP GEAR these days… I’m back at the b&b, and I have to pack to leave. Oh, hmmm… There’s a cat in here… How’d that get in the house? Is that good luck or bad luck?

I HAVE ONE CURLED UP HERE NEXT TO ME ON MY DESK, LISTENING TO YOU… IT’S GOT TO BE GOOD LUCK, I THINK?
Yeah, you’re right. It’s good luck. I moved into this Airbnb thinking “This’ll be good, they’ll be good company for me”… But they’re really strange cats though, these ones. They’re psychotic cats…

THE LAST TIME WE SPOKE WAS ABOUT A YEAR AGO – YOU WERE JUST ABOUT TO ENTER FESTIVAL SEASON, I SEEM TO REMEMBER, TOWARDS THE END OF THE LA PETITE MORT CAMPAIGN… SO, LETS TALK ABOUT THE YEAR INBETWEEN. YOU’D WORKED INCREDIBLY HARD ON THAT ALBUM, AND EVERYTHING FOLLOWING IT, SO WAS THERE TIME OR THE INCLINATION TO TAKE STOCK, OR A BREAK… OR WERE YOU STRAIGHT INTO THE PROCESS FOR THE NEW ONE?Oh, straight into the process. After LA PETITE MORT it felt like we had some momentum and we should keep it going. We went straight into the studio in Scotland, a kind of converted manor house. We made a DIY studio again, like we did for LA PETITE MORT, and worked our arses off, really, for three-and-a-half weeks. We had a great time making all these new songs that you can hear now. This was all in minus five or minus ten degrees, by the way!

THE CLOSENESS THAT THAT SORT OF ISOLATION BRINGS, AND THE RESIDENTIAL APPROACH WHEN YOU’RE WRITING AND RECORDING… WHAT DOES IT OFFER THE MUSIC?
An intensity, I think. When you’re writing songs with each other, really what you’re doing is you’re building a relationship, building a language – and so it’s more about listening than anything else. Like, I remember on about the fourth or the fifth day we had this amazing day. This thing, improvised between us, was so delicate and fragile that any wrong move would have messed it up. Everybody just hovered for about twenty minutes, high as kites in this careful listening process. We never actually made a song from that moment, but it wasn’t about that – it was about listening, it was about the communication and the connection. The next three or four songs ended up being really big songs, because we’d reached that level and developed that bond.

… A LEVEL OF TRUST…Yeah. There were five of us writing, and we all knew we were there to catch each other. If someone does something risky or wild you don’t leave them out there alone – you go out there to them and see what you could do to make that work in a song. So, in James, there’s a lot of trust and there’s a lot of communication.

I GUESS IT’S A CASE OF LEAVING EGO OUT OF IT, TOO? LIKE YOU SAY, IN THIS BAND YOU’RE ALL THERE TO CATCH EACH OTHER – NOT TO CATCH EACH OTHER OUT…
Certainly that – but there is a fair heft of ego which turns up now and again. Trust me… But that often comes much later in the process – when people have got attached to songs. You get attached to the version that you’re hearing, and then somebody else takes the song in a completely different direction. So there can be resistance, but you have to keep letting go and keep letting go… It’s like loving a song, getting attached to it, but then letting go of it… All at the same time.

AS A BAND WHICH HAS WORKED SO WELL TOGETHER FOR SUCH A LONG TIME, HOW DO YOU NAVIGATE THOSE MOMENTS? IS THERE A DEMOCRATIC PROCESS OR IS IT MUCH MORE ABOUT ONE-TO-ONE LOBBYING?It happens in many ways. Sometimes we talk it through and it becomes a bigger discussion. But we’ve found that if two people have two different ideas, we’ll try them both. It’s often quicker to do that than to sit discussing it, because it’s so easy for people to get entrenched in what they think is right, or the right way… Sorry, I’m just putting some clothes on. I’m freezing in this house…

FOUR OR FIVE LAYERS, THEN?Yeah, definitely… I’m actually shivering with the cold. It must be my Californian blood.

A LOT OF JAMES’S MUSIC GROWS OUT OF IMPROVISATION, SO YOU CAN GIVE THINGS THE ROOM TO DEVELOP BUT ALSO HAVE THIS INTENSE EYE ON WHAT’S WORKING AND WHAT ISN’T…Actually, we’re thinking of doing some improvised gigs – wholly improvised gigs – with timers. So we’d set a timer for six minutes and try and improvise a song to six minutes, and at the end of that improvisation we might set a timer for fifteen minutes and see what we can do to improvise one for fifteen, you know? That’s the writing process that we use, and it’d be interesting to see how it would come over in the live environment. That’s why Brian Eno came to work with us. That’s what made him want to record the improvised album WAH WAH alongside LAID. Eno had heard us improvise, and he believed that was what actually made us unique. I think he’s right, so I think we may try two or three gigs where we just improvise…

IT’S A BOLD IDEA…
Yeah. People will get their ticket and on it it’ll have to say ‘Purchase of this ticket may entail a really bad concert’ – because obviously we don’t know what’s going to happen. If you buy a ticket you’re buying a ticket to a lottery because we may be on that night – or we may not be that great that night…

… AND ‘GUARANTEED NO HITS’…
Yeah! Absolutely… ‘Guaranteed no hits’…

WHEN YOU’RE IMPROVISING, DO YOU FIND YOU HAVE TO ‘GET OUT OF THE WAY’ OF THE SONG, SOMETIMES, WHEN IT’S COMING?
Well, yeah. All James songs come out of improvisation – and that’s really the band’s only way of working. It’s absolutely our strength and it’s absolutely our limitation. So it’s…

… CAN I JUST INTERJECT AND ASK WHY YOU WOULD SAY THAT IT’S A LIMITATION?Because we don’t know how to write towards something. If somebody said “Write a hit single, three and a half minutes long, which does x, y and z” – which is something a lot of people can do – we wouldn’t know where to begin, ha ha… What we do is we fish. We fish for songs. We write a whole load of songs and then if we’re lucky there’s a hit in there, in the pool. There might be a song in there that you know will somehow connect with many people, in a way the other songs might not. The thing is, you don’t necessarily love that song more than the other ones.

SO HOW DOES THAT APPLY TO THE NEW ALBUM?
Well, my favourite songs on GIRL AT THE END OF THE WORLD are probably ATTENTION and MOVE DOWN SOUTH – which are not hit singles. They’re more like journey songs, which are really strange and idiosyncratic – and songs that only a band like James would make… But the hits have a certain kind of clout to them. They’re bruisers. They can go into a radio station and fight it out with ten other songs by whoever. They might get on the ‘b’ list or the ‘a’ list or whatever, because they’re songs which show their muscle. They’ve got that something about them. We can’t plan to write those sort of songs. Whereas with singer-songwriters you get these people who seem to be able to consistently make those kind of songs – and make themselves very wealthy in the process. We write a lot and if we’re very very lucky one of those might turn up.

THAT’S INTERESTING. I REMEMBER TALKING TO JIM (GLENNIE) JUST BEFORE LA PETITE MORT CAME OUT AND HE TOLD ME THAT THE SONG CURSE CURSE ARRIVED VERY LATE IN THE DAY, NONE OF YOU REALLY KNEW WHAT IT WAS, AND SO IT WAS ALMOST DISCARDED. IT WASN’T – AND, EVENTUALLY, IT CAME OUT AS A SINGLE, PROBABLY ONE OF YOUR BEST… SO YOU’RE CLEARLY NOT A BAND WHO ARE OVERLY PRECIOUS… NOT THAT YOU DON’T TAKE GREAT CARE WITH EVERYTHING YOU DO… I THINK I MEAN THAT ALL OPTIONS ARE OPEN AT ALL TIMES…
Oh absolutely. COME HOME was an afterthought on GOLD MOTHER. It was just about the last jam we did – after we’d finished recording the album. we liked it so much we put it on there… CURSE CURSE came a bit late and, actually, I don’t think we quite got it right. I think there was more to get on that song – but it didn’t get the attention it probably warranted because it arrived so late. You have to go with the songs you’ve got, really. The songs that are ready in time… There’s that deadline, always.

SO IN THE CASE OF CURSE CURSE (AND ONE OR TWO OTHERS OVER THE YEARS, I EXPECT) IT’S IN LIVE PERFORMANCE AFTER THE ALBUM CAME OUT THAT YOU COULD STRETCH IT TO WHERE IT ‘NEEDED TO BE’?
Yes, absolutely. That process is where we find that the songs get much better. Some of the songs are far better, live, because we reshape them and push them about and, as you say, stretch them in the effort to find better ways to make them work… Better ways to get to what they are, I guess. That can be a bit frustrating sometimes because, live, you end up with a far better version than the one on the record – which is the one that everyone hears.
IT’S QUITE SOMETING TO EXPERIENCE THAT – THERE’S AN EXHILARATING SENSE OF DANGER ABOUT IT… IT MUST BE INCREDIBLE FOR YOU TO BE IN THE EYE OF THAT PARTICULAR STORM AT A GIG..?
Yeah. We leave quite a few songs ‘open ended’ when we play them live, and people can sense that anything could happen. That means it could go wrong as well as it could go right. People can feel that. We could be indulgent. We could mess up, if we don’t listen properly… But it brings you right into the moment, rather than playing the same thing every night – which is where, I think, it becomes a theatre performance and lacks vitality. And maybe truth? The way we do it, it becomes a living communication with the audience that are in front of you right now and it will never be repeated. That’s the real excitement of it, I think.

IF THERE’S THE POTENTIAL FOR THINGS TO GO WRONG, IF THING DO GO ‘TITS UP’…… Ha ha ha…

… WHAT’S THE BAND’S RECOVERY MODE?
You don’t panic. If the song really goes wrong you find a way out – you summon improvisation or maybe you make a joke about it. The good thing with us now is that we’ve got to the place where when something goes wrong it’s actually an opportunity to connect, and to make the gig special in a certain kind of way. Essentially there’s nothing you can do if it collapses, so it gives you an opportunity to connect with the audience in a different way, I think… To admit that you tried something and it didn’t quite come off… To go vulnerable.

IT’S INTERESTING THAT YOU WOULD USE THE WORD ‘VULNERABLE’… I DON’T THINK THAT’S NECESSARILY WHAT PEOPLE EXPECT FROM A BAND OF YOUR STATURE. NO-ONE EXPECTS A BAND OF YOUR STATURE TO PUT THEMSELVES OUT THERE SO NAKEDLY, AND YET THIS BAND CONTINUALLY DOES. HOW DIFFICULT IS IT FOR YOU TO CONTINUE DOING THAT YEAR AFTER YEAR? IS THERE A PERSONAL COST TO YOU? THAT’S WHAT I’M GETTING AT…
Oh, yes. My lyrics are always personal. I write from the unconscious. What happens is, I write and I think “What on Earth is this I’m writing?” – but I get a sense that that’s the right lyrics for the song, though I don’t know what its about. Usually, literally round about the time the album comes out, it becomes very clear to me what the lyrics are about. That can often be very very painful. Ha ha… Or very difficult or very self-revealing in a way that I had no idea when I wrote it. This particular album, GIRL AT THE END OF THE WORLD, people will get some of the songs and get some idea about what some of the lyrics are about but… trust me… every single lyric is deeply personal. And I’m actually paying for quite a lot of that, right now…

… RIGHT, OKAY… ‘COS I’D WONDERED – AS YOU EXPOSED YOURSELF SO MUCH ON LA PETITE MORT – WHETHER THIS ONE MIGHT ACTUALLY BE SOME SORT OF A REACTION TO THAT… LIKE AN ELASTIC BAND… WHETHER YOU’D NEEDED TO GO AWAY AND LICK YOUR WOUNDS…
No… No… It’s turned out to be the opposite, ha ha ha ha… In some ways LA PETITE MORT was quite cathartic in that it enabled me to express the grief I was feeling. Less for my Mum, because she died so beautifully and there was a real completion about her death, than to my friend Gabrielle. That was sudden and there wasn’t a sense of completion, and that took me years to grieve. So LA PETITE MORT did have a cathartic aspect to it… but this new record has blindsided me…

HOW SO?
I’m not going to give you too many details because some of the details are so personal, but a song like MOVE DOWN SOUTH… That line – “move down South” – came in the first improvisation, so we got that. Usually I trust the first lyrics I get if there’re some good ones there, and I liked that… I had a sense that I wanted to move up North, to San Francisco, and I couldn’t work out why this song was “move down South” when we were going to move up North… And we moved up north to San Francisco, in the summer – but by the time the song was mixed, my family had persuaded me to move back down South to Tapanga… Including my eleven year old son, when the mixes came through, going “Dad, even your bloody lyrics are telling you you’re meant to move back down to the South, but you’re not listening”… He completely got me ‘cos he knows, my whole family knows – it’s a running joke actually – that my lyrics come true after the event… There’s a song that I’ve been quite scared of – GIRL AT THE END OF THE WORLD itself. It was envisaging being in a car crash, a head-on collision, and going over the edge at Tapanga canyon – and hoping that at that moment you remember all the beautiful moments in your life. But I’ve been quite nervous about that song, genuinely, because most of the lyrics tend to come true. Literally come true.

OH, GOD… THAT’S PRETTY SCARY…
Well! When we mixed that song, about a week later I rang Jim and he’d just been driving round a hair-pin bend and there was a car overtaking four other cars, coming towards him at fifty miles an hour, head-on. Luckily the four cars, at the last second, had slowed down enough to allow the car back in. He missed it by a split-second and was left shaking at the side of the road. So with the lyrics coming true thing, we’re hoping that’s what GIRL AT THE END OF THE WORLD was about, that particular incident – which, thankfully, didn’t actually end up with a fatality.

I’VE ACTUALLY GOT GOOSEBUMPS. THAT’S BLOODY TERRIFYING.
Yeah! Well, also we called an album WHIPLASH and the second gig on the tour I gave myself whiplash, and I was disabled for two and a half years. So we’re aware that these things seem to act almost like spells. But there’s nothing you can do – you get a lyric and you get a lyric. There’s not much you can change. I do remember once writing a song about being stabbed, but I decided we weren’t going to put that one out…

TIM, I’M GOING TO TRY SOMETHING SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT HERE, FOR THE NEXT FEW MINUTES. OVER THE LAST WEEK I’VE BEEN CANVASSING QUESTIONS FOR YOU FROM JAMES FANS ON SOCIAL MEDIA…Oh, that’s good… Okay…

… SO, HERE’S THE FIRST, THOUGH I THINK YOU MAY HAVE JUST ANSWERED IT OR TALKED A BIT ABOUT IT… “WHO IS THE GIRL AT THE END OF THE WORLD? AND, WHAT IS AT THE END OF THE WORLD?”
Mm-hmm, yes. The girl at the end of the world, from a boy’s point of view or from a gay lover’s point of view, is… Well, who are you going to think of at the last moment before you die, you know? Who is the girl at the end of the world? That’s different for every individual.

OK… “THE LYRIC “AVALANCHE VOLCANO” IN THE NEW SINGLE NOTHING BUT LOVE… WHAT DOES THAT PHRASE MEAN AND WHAT DOES THE SONG MEAN?”
People talk about love songs, the joy of love, to be in love… This is more, you know, “Oh shit… I’m in love with this person”… They may not be in love with you, it may be a totally inappropriate love… It’s “Oh-oh” kind of love. It’s a love that threatens your life, in a certain kind of way… or all the safety of your life…

… YOUR STATUS QUO…
Yeah, that’s right. So “avalanche volcano” is that it’s gone off like that. It’s not an easy going kind of love.

IT’S GREAT TO FEEL THAT SORT OF INTENSITY ONCE IN A WHILE THOUGH, ISN’T IT? OR EVEN JUST THE ONCE?
Erm, I think it’s what some people actually crave, the kind of love some people live for… But, yeah – absolutely. It makes you feel alive.

OK… “TURNING UP THE KEYBOARDS FOR THE LAST COUPLE OF ALBUMS HAS GIVEN JAMES A NEW LEASE OF CREATIVE LIFE. TIM, DO YOU AGREE?”
Yes I do. And I was probably the most responsible for that on LA PETITE MORT. I was, like, “Right. We’re not having this anymore Mark” and I just kept on bullying him to turn up. Because, what would happen is, we’d get to mixing a new record and we’d suddenly hear these amazing keyboard lines – but nobody had fed off them, nobody had bounced off them, or shaped the music around them because we’d never heard them while we were jamming or creating the songs. So I just said “This is what we’re doing. Mark’s getting turned up”, ha ha… So we turned him up, in the room, and people bounced off him and he took up space. He’d have a great line for certain songs, like CURSE CURSE, and then that means the whole song has to make the room for that keyboard line… I think by the time this record was coming through Mark had got enough confidence to go “Okay, this works, this is worthwhile”. So he’s continued with very little bullying since, ha ha…

OK… “LARRY (GOTT, GUITARIST) IS SITTING OUT THIS TOUR. WHERE IS HE, AND WHY IS THAT?”
You’d have to ask him.

OK…
I will just say that in James, many different things go on internally and we don’t use them publicly. We just don’t. Many bands – say Oasis, the Mondays – have used their internal frictions publicly. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s their choice. But in James we circle the wagons. That’s partly why I think we’ve survived so long.

OK… HERE’S THE LAST FAN QUESTION… “WITH ALL THE TWISTS AND TURNS OF A THIRTY YEAR CAREER- AND YOUR OFTEN REFERRED TO ABILITY TO ‘SNATCH DEFEAT FROM THE JAWS OF VICTORY’ – HOW HAPPY ARE YOU WITH WHERE JAMES ARE IN 2016?”… MYSELF, TIM, I THINK THE LAST TWO YEARS HAVE BEEN A REALLY HIGH WATERMARK, BUT…
… Yeah, I think so too. Musically, I feel it’s been very much a high watermark. These two albums feel great, they’re up there with nearly anything else we’ve done… But sometimes we get a little pissed off that we don’t get as much recognition as we feel we should have done. That’s probably our own fault – we’ve been a difficult band. We made a lot of choices like that in the ’90s – for instance, not allowing the American record company to release SIT DOWN as a single when they came and begged us. We made what could be considered artistic choices, but some of them may also have been foolish choices.

SO YOU HAVE REGRETS?
Well, no. You can’t really regret. God knows if we’d actually have been able to handle any more success. Possibly not. I think you get what you can handle – or, rather, I think we’ve managed to get what we can handle. James was fairly dysfunctional in the late ’90s – as people. We had a lot of casualties, but I think it could have been a lot worse if we’d had more money or more success.

IN THE HOSPITALITY AREA BACKSTAGE, LAST TIME WE MET, I’D NEVER SEEN SO MANY PUNNETS OF STRAWBERRIES IN ONE PLACE…
Ha ha ha… I don’t actually remember all the strawberries!

THERE WERE MILLIONS!
That sounds like an unusual day… Well, perhaps we’d had a fantastically benevolent strawberry farmer visit us bearing all of those punnets as gifts..?

… SO IT’S CLEARLY A HEALTHY MACHINE, IN GOOD SHAPE… BUT HOW EQUIPPED IS IT IN TERMS OF CREATIVITY AND, LET’S SAY, MIDDLE-AGED APPETITE, TO CONTINUE ON?
Most of us are quite healthy. We’ve gone through different phases. Different people have gone through many different phases – all of us have, really. I’ve always had to be healthy ‘cos I was born with an inherited liver disease and that’s kept me on the straight and narrow – which has probably saved my life, really, when I look at what’s gone on in this band.

DID IT GET ‘ROCK ‘N’ ROLL’…
Well James aren’t known for being a ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ band but when we did Lollapalooza with Snoop Dog and Korn and Tool and all those bands, we were known as the heaviest band on the tour, the wildest on the tour. We were the band that stole the golf buggy carts and crashed them, and we were the band that partied every day and that the other bands couldn’t keep up with. It’s funny.

THAT’S REALLY SURPRISING!
Well, again, we closed the wagons and didn’t make publicity on it. Well, we make publicity on it twenty years later, ha ha. That’s when we’ll talk about some of these things! At the time we don’t tell people these things. But that’s James – we have a private life and we look after ‘the family’, and that’s been important to our longevity… So, mainly we’re pretty healthy. I can’t think of anyone in too much trouble at the moment… But there’s always somebody tottering around quite close to the edge, ha ha…

… HA HA… THERE HAS TO BE…
Yeah, there has to be. It’s almost like we take it in turns. We take it in turns to be the band dickhead. And at various points in time everyone’s been the band dickhead, ha ha…

… HA HA… WELL, TO ROUND UP…
… Who’s the band dickhead? Probably me!

… HA HA… IS THE FUTURE FOR JAMES OPEN-ENDED OR ARE THERE DEFINITE PLANS? ARE THERE THINGS YOU STILL NEED TO SAY, AND IS JAMES THE VEHICLE YOU’RE HAPPY TO USE TO CONTINUE SAYING THEM?
So long as it stays so fresh and exciting – which it is – then yeah. It depends also on finances. We’re an expensive band and if we don’t have a record company behind us it becomes tricky. I wouldn’t like to record an album to follow this one unless we can bring really great people on board to make it sound as good as this one. Part of leaving after the PLEASED TO MEET YOU album was that I didn’t think we could ever top it.

WHY’S THAT?
I felt like we’d reached a creative peak, but we were so damaged as a band that I thought “We’re not going to top this so let’s go out on a high”… So it’s actually always hard to know. We might decide the same on this one – like, ha ha, “How can we follow this one? Maybe we should stop”. God knows, we just don’t know. The other big thing is, how long can we keep on physically improving our concerts? At the moment there’s a real sense that we’re still getting better as a band, as a live band. That’s so contradictory to what people expect from ageing, isn’t it? There must come a point that you can’t match, that you can’t beat. And I don’t want to go past that. I really don’t. I want us to go out with people knowing that we were at our peak – and the peak for James was not the ’90s…

I THINK THE LAST TWO ALBUMS – LA PETITE MORT AND GIRL AT THE END OF THE WORLD – MORE THAN PROVE THAT, TIM. THANKS VERY MUCH FOR YOUR TIME AND GOOD LUCK WITH WHATEVER COMES NEXT…
Thank you, my pleasure. The same to you, too… The thing is, you can’t look into the tea-leaves, as much as we might try… Actually, I do look into the tea-leaves…

Read our interview with Tim and Jim Glennie from last summer hereBuy GIRL AT THE END OF THE WORLD direct from James hereBuy tickets for the forthcoming UK tour here